Concrete Inferno

After a coup in 1964 that ousted Brazil’s leftist President João Goulart from power, a brutal military dictatorship took the reins of the state. As a result, elements of the persecuted Brazilian Communist Party split from a more peaceful, orthodox line and declared their intent to wage an insurgent war against the government, plunging the country into a conflagration of violence marked by cycles of urban bombings, political assassinations, institutional torture, kidnappings, and summary executions. Concrete Inferno relays this period in Brazil in a lucid narrative history, exploring what drove the military coup of 1964, the subsequent rise of the Armed Left, and the successes and failures of the insurgency and how it concluded. Stretching from the rumblings of discontent during João Goulart’s ascendancy in 1961 to the strange conclusion of the dictatorship in 1985, the book draws on new primary sources and a wealth of English- and Portuguese-language resources to provide a complete and evenhanded portrait of the conflict.